The present invention relates to reusable assets, and more specifically, to methods, systems and computer program products for process-driven feedback for reusable digital assets.
Digital assets are reusable components that provide solutions to recurring issues in Information Technology (IT) projects. Digital assets can be composed by one or more artifacts, which are any work products from a software development lifecycle, such as requirements documents, models, process specification, source code files, deployment descriptors, test cases or scripts. An asset can be classified from one or more perspectives (i.e., metadata) that help to identify the context of use in which the assets can be searched and used. Assets can be linked together to reflect a relationship the assets possess. Assets can include design assets, which are written documents that describe general solutions to design problems that recur repeatedly in many projects; tools, which are a set of assets that aid in development or recreation of an application or task; and components (services), which are identifiable parts of a larger program or construction. Assets can offer multiple benefits including: cost and complexity reduction of compliance with secure intellectual property sharing; unification of disparate teams and rework elimination by providing secure asset tracking, by managing assets and artifacts interdependencies and relationships and by monitoring asset utilization; and information storage that is useful for collaborating on software development of assets.
Assets can impact all phases of an IT project lifecycle. The context of use for assets can be broadly defined by business-processes or other models set by software vendors as well as some standards (e.g., SAP, Oracle, Ontology, APQC, ISO-Standard, OMG Reusable Asset Specification). However, the context of use can be specific to a project (e.g. engagement). “Consuming an Asset” represents the acts of identifying, selecting, downloading, importing, and manipulating assets to productive use. Often times, when downloaded as part of a project, users can change assets to reflect specific project needs. Changes can be many-fold and concern both assets content and metadata and artifacts. In addition, users may realize changes on the artifacts composing an asset.
There is not an integrated method or system to automatically identify and manage changes on assets and artifacts on a per-project based. Feedback about asset and artifact content changes is dependent on a single user's ability and willingness to enter feedback about the asset and artifact changes. Similarly, feedback on asset metadata is currently unstructured tags with no direct relation with the context of use (i.e. business processes) in which assets and artifacts have been used for a project. In addition, while many users might make some changes on assets, not all users might have the skills (or interest) to report feedback on those changes back to the asset registry. Therefore, potentially valuable feedback remains hidden within the projects and not used to improve the management of assets.